


back to genesis

by ilgaksu



Series: ceasefire [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Exes, Cuban Lance (Voltron), Dream Sequences, Exes, Korean Keith (Voltron), M/M, Texan Keith (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 02:12:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8352250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: Lance sits up in the half-dark, headphones a tangle in his hands.“This was a mistake,” Keith immediately decides. He stays standing in the doorway to Lance’s room and doesn’t take one step further. It’s called boundary maintenance.“I’m awake now,” Lance says, which isn’t confirmation either way.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feasted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feasted/gifts).



> i'd completed this series, but then it turned out feasted had made me a PLAYLIST and then i decided to write something as a result, so this is for them. i guess? i'm sorry? thank you?

The dust sticks to Keith's face and gets in his eyes. It doesn't sting, though, which should seem strange but doesn’t. The keys to the truck are burning in his hand, hissing softly against his skin. The truck itself is on fire, Keith in the driver’s seat.

"Boys on fire always burn out," Lance says, leaning over from the back seat; the seat a hot line against Keith’s back, Lance’s silhouette no respite. "Didn't they tell you that at your rodeo?"

The line of his shoulders is ablaze. His breath against Keith's ear carries with the smell of woodsmoke and Keith's own burning hair.

"Fuck you, cargo pilot," Keith says, and puts the keys in the ignition.

"Is that the best you can do, Keith?" Shiro says, riding shotgun with his voice a rasp and gasoline eyes, his hair gone white-hot. When he speaks, smoke billows out of his mouth, an indirect kiss into Keith's lungs when he breathes in that tastes like soil and recycled air and old, dying things. Keith kickstarts the car. The engine screams a very human scream and dies. All the windows blow out at once.

"Aren't you, like, supposed to be good at this?" Lance drawls. He puts his hand on Keith's shoulder and Keith watches the welts rise, sharp on his skin, without ever feeling any pain. Shiro spits glass out of his mouth, blood-speckled against the dashboard. When Keith yanks at the door, it sticks. He swears.

"Come on," Shiro chides, "Isn't this what you've been training for?"

Keith leans out of the window and grapples with the door that way. It's welded shut with the heat of the internal fire. 

"Sit down and finish the simulation, drop-out!"

Keith looks at them both and wavers. Then he pulls his jacket over his head. Levering his upper body out of the window, Keith claws his way out. He hits the asphalt. _ Stop, drop and roll _ . Looks up wildly and sees a dirt track unspooling towards the horizon. The truck is still on fire. 

  
"There's a way out," he tells Shiro and Lance.  Shiro and Lance look at him.    


"There's nothing that way," Shiro says, sounding confused. Lance sniggers in the backseat. 

Their hair is on fire now, making them both ever more unholy.

"Like we'd trust you," Lance sneers. "You're so fucking weird, Keith. You're always late to the party. You always get there too late."

Keith tears his eyes away to look at Shiro. He shrugs.

"Shut up," Keith grits, gravel in his palms, fire in his skin, dust in his eyes. He is a boy made of elements. He is a boy made of starspace. He is a boy made of -

"Shut the _ fuck _ up," Keith says, and tears the truck door off its hinges with his bare hands.

He drags Shiro out and throws him to the ground, throws Lance after, watches them cough in the wake of his noonday shadow. How was he strong enough to do that? His hands are claws and his skin is fire and it feels like his eyes themselves are burning supernova.

"What is wrong with you?" Lance spits. His eyes are wrong, Keith notices. Lance's eyes should be blue. Lance’s eyes - 

Keith looks down at his hands.

"I don't know," he replies honestly, and wakes up.

*

Lance sits up in the half-dark, headphones a tangle in his hands. 

“This was a mistake,” Keith immediately decides. He stays standing in the doorway to Lance’s room and doesn’t take one step further. It’s called boundary maintenance. 

“I’m awake now,” Lance says, which isn’t confirmation either way. He scrubs his hands over his face. His bare shoulder in the light from the corridor makes Keith’s skin itch. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” Keith says. 

“Yeah, I figured,” Lance tells him with a sideways glance. Keith not sleeping isn’t anything new. Some days, when the world was unravelling and they began to take the posters with Shiro’s face on them down; some days, Keith saw one and ripped it apart with a level of ferocity like a lightning bolt; that is to say, pure and violent, cleaving in two, leaving the target forever changed, Lance grabbing his wrists in the middle of the corridor and saying, “What’s gotten into you?”

“They missed one,” Keith had replied, and Lance’s eyes were very wide, and Keith had said, “You can give me my hands back now, Lance, I’m not going to do anything stupid,” leaving Lance, who for all the others watching knew was only Keith’s roommate, no choice but to let him go. Some days, Lance would wake to see Keith dead on his feet and smoking through a crack in the window, smoke alarms disabled. It wasn’t his fault. Sometimes he’d look out at the desert skyline and his eyes would just - get stuck somehow - and then it would be morning. When Keith woke smelling fire, he’d reached for the knife under his pillow and it hadn’t been enough, and he’d been half-asleep, and a week ago Lance listened to him and didn’t look at him like Keith had asked him not to and - 

Lance sighs. 

“Give me a sec,” Lance says, and gets out of bed. Keith remembers to turn away, hears he sound of Lance trying to find his jacket in the low light. 

“You know,” Keith says, “if you always put it in the same place, you wouldn’t lose it so often.” 

“Shut up, Keith.”

It’s so familiar Keith has to bite the inside of his cheek not to smile. Lance throws his jacket on. He didn’t used to zip it all the way up, but he does now. Boundary maintenance, Keith thinks. They go to the kitchen. The air is stale and recycled; Lance is pushed beyond his reach; the stars outside remain, at least, a fixed point in Keith’s eyes like a compass. 

“You can smoke, if you want,” Lance says. When Keith looks at him, he’s pressing a series of buttons inset into glass, all his weight shifted onto one foot. His hair’s a mess. There’s nothing on his wrists to show that less than forty-eight hours ago, he was tied up on an alien planet. Keith thinks about making a joke. He opens his mouth.

“One word about Nyma,” Lance says, “And I’m going back to bed, dude.” 

Keith shuts his mouth, and then shrugs. 

“I quit.”

“What, again?” Lance says, retrieving a glass of something that’s faintly pink and translucent and steams. He swallows a mouthful, then looks at Keith’s face. “When?” 

“When someone maneuvered us out of the same galaxy as my lighter and leaving me with one cigarette left, onboard a castle ship with Coran. He’s confused by  _ recreational poisoning. _ ” 

Lance laughs.

“I can’t believe Coran called you out. Actually, you know what, no. I’m lying. I can.” He takes another mouthful and smirks. “I can’t believe you listened to him. Your type’s sure changed.” 

He saunters past Keith to the sofa, draining his glass and abandoning it on the table. He drops down onto the cushions and goes, “So.” 

“So,” Keith agrees. He’s sure this used to be easier, but then he remembers that it used to be easier because Lance would find him in the morning at the window and hip-check him wearing a blanket like a cape. He’d climb up into Lance’s bed, and Lance would say, “You’re cold,” in between kissing him until his brain went quiet. “You’re cold and you taste bad.”  

“You can stop,” Keith would offer, and Lance would hum thoughtfully, and he never stopped. 

But Lance said _ I can’t do this again.  _ Keith isn’t sure what parts he meant; Lance wasn’t very clear. He’s beginning to wonder how clear Lance was in his own mind. 

“Nyma,” he begins, and Lance sits up in a sudden movement, looking angry.

“I’m going back to bed.” 

“No,” Keith says, “I mean - aren’t you pissed at her? I’d be so pissed at her.”

He _is_ pissed at her; there’s this mixture of jealousy and rage and stung pride curdling in his belly, stinging every time it rises up in his throat and forces him to register it. He swallows and looks at Lance and says, “I’m just -”

“No,” Lance says, “I’m not.” 

“What?” Keith echoes, and Lance shrugs and draws his knees up to his chest.  

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” Lance says, “As a plan. You gotta admire it. It worked, after all.”

“It’s a shitty plan,” Keith replies hotly, “It relies on one of us being -” 

“It worked, Keith,” Lance interrupts firmly. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a genius plan. It doesn’t matter how clever it is. Nobody’s testing us out here.” He smiles, a crooked, self-deprecating smile that works like a harpoon. Keith is drowning in air, in something that has always been safe; Keith is being reeled in, bleeding all over the fucking floor. “You don’t have to be the best to get that. The plan that works, dude. Even a cargo pilot knows that.”   

“Don’t call yourself that,” Keith snaps, and Lance raises his eyebrows. 

“Can’t hurt if it’s true, Keith,” Lance says, which is a fucking lie and they both know it. Keith grew up listening to enough shit talked in his high schools about boys like him to know the truth is the only thing that cuts you open, some days. 

“Maybe you’d be better in battle if you weren’t constantly wrestling with your own shitty self-esteem, Lance.” 

There’s a horrible beat of silence, where Keith swears he can feel the drop in his stomach. 

“Okay, ouch,” Lance says, “Look, Keith, this is why people hated being in group projects with you.”

“I’d only say it to help,” Keith tries to defend himself. “I only wanted -- want -- I thought it’d make them better.” 

_ I want you to be better _ , Keith thinks, and then corrects himself. _ No. I want you to know you’re better.  _

“We don’t all hear shit like that and want to prove them wrong, Keith,” Lance says. “Some of us hear shit like that and it stops there. Fuck, I’m getting more of this -- whatever this is.” 

He gets up and heads towards the glass panel again. Guiltily, Keith steps out of the way. He waits until Lance’s back is turned to say, “I’m sorry,” just as Lance says, “I’ll work on it.” 

“What?”

“You want me to get better? Fine. Fuck it. Fuck you. I’ll get better,” Lance says, and stabs in a combination sequence, so fast Keith can’t follow. 

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Keith apologises.

“I’m used to you,” Lance says, and slides the glass panel a little too aggressively to get his drink. 

“I’m still sorry.”

“Whatever, Keith.” Lance drains half the glass in one go. This time it’s blue and sticky, and tinges his mouth. He must have changed his mind about what he wanted. “It’s true.”

“You would’ve come up with a better plan,” Keith says. “That’s why it’s shitty! It’s true and it’s shitty, alright? It was a shitty plan because it used people to get something. You’d come up with a better plan because you’re better than that, and then you sit there and call yourself shit, and -” 

He stops for breath, and Lance puts down his glass on the table. The noise of it almost throws him out, but Lance is half-frowning. His hair’s a mess. He zipped up his jacket, and he never used to bother. 

“Go on,” he says. “I want to see where you’re trying to go with this. You’re going.....somewhere, I guess.” 

“You’d be better if you didn’t do that, alright? You don’t take shots because you don’t think you can make them. They had you as a cargo pilot and it was bullshit and you never told them half you fucking knew, you just laughed along and I don’t know, Lance. And you know what? It’s also shitty of me to say, but it’s true, and you know it’s true, and that’s why it hurts. That’s why I’m sorry. It’s worse when it’s true.”

Keith is breathing fast by the time he’s done. Something in Lance’s jaw shifts and he turns to look over Keith’s shoulder rather than at him directly. The look on his face is on Keith hasn’t seen for a while. 

“I told you not to bring up Nyma,” is all he says. 

Shortly after Keith moved out of the Garrison, he looked up on his tablet how long it takes to get over an ex. He remembers most people said it was half the time you’d been in love with them. He remembers dropping his tablet over the side of his couch and leaving it there for a while, just to prove a point to himself. They were apart six months when he saw Lance again, and now he wonders if there’s something in him irrevocably altered beyond a quantifiable point. There is no downgrading for him. There’s only a steady sequence; integers; infinite. 

His boundary maintenance is slipping. He leans over the table and takes the glass from Lance’s side. He drinks the rest of it. It’s sweet. Lance watches him drink it and says nothing. 

“I’m going to go back to bed,” Keith says, before he does anything else stupid. Lance’s eyes are very blue to match the inside of both their mouths.“Thanks.” 

“Sure,” Lance says faintly. Keith flees. 

He locks himself in his own room, and doesn’t go to sleep for a long time. His heart is a Fraunhofer line. Jagged, unreliable, and all too recognisable, thanks to experience. 

It’s worse when it’s true. There’s no skyline to watch. Keith stays awake anyway. 


End file.
